Getting Ready..

Things are getting close-- I leave, if all goes well, for Turkish Kurdistan (can't call it Kurdistan over there but I guess I can here) early Tuesday morning. I am going to put a whole lot of stuff in today, but may not be able to do much more before I leave. Doubtless will have PLENTY of tales to tell when I return. No magazines have bitten yet-- is it them, or me?

The plot: I have been asked by two women my own age (relevant-- one correspondent said the if we were all twenty- something hardbodies we would already have an article sold) to be the token male and "bodyguard"on an expedition to the mountains of southeast Turkey to find new tazi/ saluki pups-- new genetic material-- in an area where one of them, an anthropologist, got her foundation female twenty years ago. Both their local guide and their husbands wanted me to go!

Hardly a life- or - death mission, but it's still old PPK guerilla territory and has been closed off in the past. There have been bombs going off near Batman (great name for a town!) but we don't intend to go that far east (near Iraq). On the other hand, we do intend to go near Syria. We have been told not to travel at night (PPK bandits) and to be very polite to trigger- happy Turkish patrols.Yes sir.

And-- how to put this delicately?--I am NOT a spy ! A couple of years ago, my friend Richard Miniter--click here for his latest book--mentioned my Asian travels to Samizdata's Brian Micklethwait. Brian had a creative take on my birdwatching in faraway places:he thought I was a spook!

"People who habitually watch birds in countries other than their own are as likely as not spooks of some kind, in my opinion. After all, what better way is there to spy on metal birds and their habitats, and such like, than to pretend to be looking only at regular ones? And this bird man is also a gun man. Add the fact that one of Richard's forthcoming books is about Bill Clinton's (mis)handling of al-Qaeda and is apparently full of juicy revelations, and you get the picture. These guys may not have spook ranks and spook serial numbers, but they definitely have good friends who do."

Honestly--much as I admire Richard Meinertzhagen, I am just a writer. Turkish police with computers, take note.